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[MIA]

He was super-wise, but there is not a single easily named idea original to him that you do on a regularly that he directly and literally recommended?

[jimwalton]

That's correct. First of all, his teaching that set him apart was on spiritual matters, not on regular human behavior. Secondly, your category of (a) an idea original to him (b) that you do on a regular basis (c) that Jesus taught literally makes for an extremely narrow bandwidth. Third, his wisdom was just part of the picture of his divinity. But as I said, it was his knowledge of spiritual matters that is more pertinent to his divinity, not his moral teachings about how to be a good person.

[MIA]

> That's correct. ... First of all, his teaching that set him apart was on spiritual matters, not on regular human behavior.

Great. So when Christians act like shitheads they really don't know any better because all that stuff about loving your neighbor was not really about human behavior...

> Secondly, your category of (a) an idea original to him (b) that you do on a regular basis (c) that Jesus taught literally makes for an extremely narrow bandwidth.

Let's be clear, Jesus taught ideas original to him and taught things literally...they are just all awful ideas. Like the command to love your enemy, which is absurd.

> Third, his wisdom was just part of the picture of his divinity. But as I said, it was his knowledge of spiritual matters that is more pertinent to his divinity, not his moral teachings about how to be a good person.

I can only wonder what god's problem is. He comes to Moses and tells him that if two men have sex...they need to be killed. That slavery is ok, but that there are limits. God tells Moses all this reprehensible stuff and yet Jesus comes along and doesn't follow any of it supposedly...

[jimwalton]

> So when Christians act like shitheads they really don't know any better because all that stuff about loving your neighbor was not really about human behavior...

First of all, not everyone who uses the label "Christian" is really one. So somehow you need to separate between the real Christians and the posers. Second, Christians *do* know better, or at least they should. "Loving your neighbor" is about human behavior, and that's why it's not original to Jesus. "Love your neighbor" isn't original with Jesus. It first shows up in Leviticus 19.18, roughly 1300 BC or so. But anybody with half a brain knows that we need to figure out how to get along with each other, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a prophet to tell us to love each other.

> love your enemy

This shows up in Matt. 5.43. You say it's awful, but I say there's merit in being generous beyond our friendship circle, and even to those who harbor hate. To just return hate for hate is the quick path to escalating violence and death for many.

But the specific context of Jesus' comment is in the environment of people hating us just because we're Christians, and thinking that our ideas are awful and absurd, not to mention any names. : ) The Christian's attitude to religious persecution, including intellectual persecution, is supposed to go beyond simple non-retaliation, but also to be selflessly concerned for the other person's wellbeing. What's so awful about that? The world needs more grace and not so much nastiness, hate, and violence against those who disagree with us. We need people who won't just pick up the fight and retaliate in kind, but to break the cycle of nastiness and respond with just letting stuff go by (turn the other cheek).

> if two men have sex...they need to be killed.

Archaeology has shown us that the homosexual actions of the ancient world were almost exclusively the perpetration of rape and pederasty, and I would hope you'd agree that such things shouldn't just be ignored or accepted. The ancient world knew nothing of lifetime same-sex relationships. Instead it was a world of sexual predation, sexual power, and sexual abuse. No wonder God spoke out against it. I would think we all should.

> That slavery is ok

The definition of slavery has changed. In the ancient world, slavery was more like employment; almost all "slavery" was debt-servitude; once the debt was paid off, the worker was no longer obligated. But they used the word "slave." Then during the days of the Greco-Roman culture, slavery came to mean owning human beings, a thought that continued into the violently abusive era of colonization by Europe and the colonial era in America, reaching horrific measures in the antebellum American south. That's what we think of when we think of slavery, but that's not the slavery of the ancient world—the world of the OT. They just didn't have a word for "employee".

> Jesus comes along and doesn't follow any of it supposedly

Jesus followed the law unreservedly. I don't know what you're talking about here.

[MIA]

> You said, "So when Christians act like shitheads they really don't know any better because all that stuff about loving your neighbor was not really about human behavior..." I said, "First of all, not everyone who uses the label "Christian" is really one."

I hate when christians do this. They arbitrarily reject other self-proclaimed christians based on their own perception of what the religion is and is not. For centuries christians fought and killed each other over who was the "real christians" and even today the same mindset is prevelant, it's just absorbed a humanist attitude of live and let heretic live.

> So somehow you need to separate between the real Christians and the posers.

Twas easier when thou burned thine heretics on a wooded pyre!

> Second, Christians do know better, or at least they should. "Loving your neighbor" is about human behavior, and that's why it's not original to Jesus. "Love your neighbor" isn't original with Jesus. It first shows up in Leviticus 19.18, roughly 1300 BC or so.
18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.
But anybody with half a brain knows that we need to figure out how to get along with each other, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a prophet to tell us to love each other.

Telling jews not to kill other jews makes sense. Not so sure about loving someone as you love yourself.

> love your enemy ... This shows up in Matt. 5.43. You say it's awful, but I say there's merit in being generous beyond our friendship circle, and even to those who harbor hate. To just return hate for hate is the quick path to escalating violence and death for many.

It doesn't say be generous to non-friends. It doesn't to return hate for hate. It says to love them. This is what christians always want to do, they reinterpret the garbage to be useful.

Jesus says to love your enemy....ehhh...that's f***ing nuts....if i tried to love a wahabi muslim he would saw my head off with a dull blade...ok...i will just say something bland and peaceful sounding like 'there's merit in being generous beyond our friendship circle, and even to those who harbor hate.'

Jesus spoke rather clearly...and its awful, disgusting idea that can easily get you hurt or worse.

> But the specific context of Jesus' comment is in the environment of people hating us just because we're Christians, and thinking that our ideas are awful and absurd, not to mention any names. : )

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[i] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I'm not who Jesus is talking about. My entire family is christian. I'm no danger to anyone. There are real enemies out there that want you dead...jesus thinks you should love them.

> The Christian's attitude to religious persecution, including intellectual persecution, is supposed to go beyond simple non-retaliation, but also to be selflessly concerned for the other person's wellbeing. What's so awful about that?

Then go do it. Go to somewhere like Egypt, where christians are actually persecuted. My friend lived there for a couple years, was dating a coptic christian and she was a catholic. There was a high propensity for violence by Muslims and she ended up leaving. Go live in Egypt and care selflessly for the people who would prefer you get your face smashed in.

> The world needs more grace and not so much nastiness, hate, and violence against those who disagree with us. We need people who won't just pick up the fight and retaliate in kind, but to break the cycle of nastiness and respond with just letting stuff go by (turn the other cheek).

Then go do it. Go live that life. Go actually sacrifice for your religion. Sitting around on the Internet isn't achieving anything. You will see how wonderful it really is.

> "if two men have sex...they need to be killed." Archaeology has shown us that the homosexual actions of the ancient world were almost exclusively the perpetration of rape and pederasty, and I would hope you'd agree that such things shouldn't just be ignored or accepted.

Evidence.

> The ancient world knew nothing of lifetime same-sex relationships. Instead it was a world of sexual predation, sexual power, and sexual abuse. No wonder God spoke out against it. I would think we all should.

Want evidence please. This is a claim i have never heard.

> "That slavery is ok." The definition of slavery has changed. In the ancient world, slavery was more like employment;

Bullshit. You can beat your slaves, you can't beat employees.

> almost all "slavery" was debt-servitude; once the debt was paid off, the worker was no longer obligated. But they used the word "slave." Then during the days of the Greco-Roman culture, slavery came to mean owning human beings, a thought that continued into the violently abusive era of colonization by Europe and the colonial era in America, reaching horrific measures in the antebellum American south. That's what we think of when we think of slavery, but that's not the slavery of the ancient world—the world of the OT. They just didn't have a word for "employee".

Bullshit. Complete garbage without merit.

> "Jesus comes along and doesn't follow any of it supposedly." Jesus followed the Law of Moses unreservedly. I don't know what you're talking about here.

When jesus was criticized for picking seeds on the sabbath, what was his justification?

[jimwalton]

The conversation is almost expanding too far beyond the ability of the format to handle, but I'll try. Some of my answers may be briefer than I would like.

> I hate when christians do this, they arbitrarily reject other self-proclaimed christians based on their own perception of what the religion is and is not.

Jesus himself taught such things. Mt. 7.21-23; 13.24-30, explained in Mt. 13.36-43. There will be a lot of posers, fakers, hypocrites, and instigators pretending to be Christians and making us all look bad. Paul experienced them (2 Tim. 2.17; 3.1-9, 12-13) and we do too.

> It doesn't say be generous to nom-friends

Yes it does. Lev. 19.18 says to love your neighbors, and vv. 33-34 specify that it includes foreigners (non-Jews).

> Then go do it. Go to somewhere lile Egypt, where christians are actually persecuted.

Yep, there are a lot of Christians in the Middle East. They are busy loving their neighbors. There is great persecution of them there, and many are being killed. But at the same time many Muslims are becoming Christians now because of way Christians act and treat them.

> Evidence [for "Archaeology has shown us that the homosexual actions of the ancient world were almost exclusively the perpetration of rape and pederasty"]

There is a long article at http://epistle.us/hbarticles/neareast.html talking about the preponderance of rape and pederasty. We can see from this article that homosexuality in the world of the ancient Near East was not totality pederastic, though that may have been a majority of it. We also see that it, along with heterosexual prostitution, was part of their pagan religious system, as it was in the days of the NT as well (notably, but not exclusively, Corinth). A third expression of homosexuality seems to have been homosexuality relationships between consenting adults by choice. According to the research, the end was not a marriage relationship, or even an enduring one, but merely another way to express one's affections.

Sarah Ruden, in "Paul Among the People", says, "Perhaps, in the matter of homosexuality, what [Paul] saw as a boy influenced him more than his tradition did. Among the female prostitutes on the streets, or in the windows or doorways of brothels, were males, on average a lot younger. At any slave auction he found himself watching, there might be attractive boys his own age knocked down to local pimps at high prices, to the sound of jokes about how much they would have to endure during their brief careers in order to be worth it. A pious Jewish family, as Paul's probably was, would not have condoned sexual abuse of any of its slaves, but he would know from his non-Jewish friends that household slaves normally were less respected as outlets for bodily functions than were the household toilets, and that a sanctioned role of slave boys was anal sex with free adults.

"Flagrant pedophiles might have pestered him and his friends on the way to and from school, offered friendship, offered tutoring, offered athletic training, offered money or gifts. But adults he trusted would have told him that even any flirting could ruin his reputation, and at worst get him officially classed as a male prostitute, with the loss of all of his civic rights. After his conversion, as he preached what Jesus meant for human society, he wasn’t going to let anyone believe that it included any of this.

"The Roman poet Martial uses 'to be cut to pieces' as the ordinary term for 'to be the passive partner.' The Greeks and Romans thought that the active partner in homosexual intercourse used, humiliated, and physically and morally damaged the passive one. Heterosexual penetration could be harmless in the Christian community, in marriage; homosexual penetration could be harmless nowhere. There were no gay households; there were in fact no gay institutions or gay culture at all, in the sense of times or places in which it was mutually safe for men to have anal sex with one another.

"In 5th-century Athens (the gay paradise we hear of), one of the most common insults in comedy was 'having a loose anus,' meaning depraved—not just sexually, but generally.

"No wonder parents guarded their young sons doggedly. It was, for example, normal for a family of any standing to dedicate one slave to a son's protection, especially on the otherwise unsupervised walk to and from school: this was the pedagogue, or 'child leader.' Since success with freeborn, citizen-class boys was rare, predators naturally turned to those with no protectors, young male slaves and prostitutes. Besides that of the pedagogue, another telling slave profession—perhaps only among Romans—was that of the deliciae ('pet') or concubines ('bedmate'), a slave boy whose main duty was passive anal sex with the master. The public acknowledged such a child’s status, as well as his vulnerability to being retired at a young age. His retirement was not likely to be a happy one; he kept the stigma of passive sodomy, but he lost the protection of his close relationship to his master, while usually remaining bound to the same household and the other slaves with the accumulated grudges. They may have refused him, as he would have passed his 'boom,' even the status of a sexual plaything. (She continues her chapter with pages and pages of information.)

> the definition of slavery has changed.

Dr. Paul Wright says, "There is no evidence of chattel slavery in the ancient Near East. ... When we think of slavery, the first thing that comes to mind is either slavery in the pre-Civil War US or slavery as we hear it in places of the modern Middle East (via ISIS or such groups).

"The textual evidence that we have for slavery in the ancient world (—by this I mean the ancient Near East, the context in which ancient Israel arose, not ancient Rome) shows by and large a different kind of “institution” (that’s not the right word to use). For this reason, the Hebrew word, eved, is better translated 'servant.' The overall textual evidence from the ancient Near East shows that slaves had certain rights—they could own property, for instance, or determine inheritance. Or they could become free, as the Bible allows, given certain circumstances. They were typically not bought and sold, opposite as the case in the medieval and modern worlds. “Force Labor,” or the corvée, is a more complicated issue, essentially a tax on person by the government for a certain period of time (e.g., 1 Kgs 9:15). Note that the servants that Israel is allowed to take from among the foreigners are able to receive inheritance from their 'owner'—Lev 25:46.

"The larger question is to what extent the Bible participates in the world of the ancient Near East, and to what extent it expresses a set of ethical standards which at the same time presuppose it yet work to change it. There’s a whole lot of middle ground, actually. This is what makes an understanding of the context of that day so vitally important as a place to start."

Even about Leviticus 25.46 ("You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life") Jacob Milgrom says: "The law merely indicates that the jubilee doesn't apply to non-Israelite slaves. 'It does not imply that the slave is a piece of property at the mercy of his master' (Mendelsohn 1962:388)."

Dr. Craig Blomberg writes, "The most important matter is [in what the Bible] actually says, and there is not a single text anywhere in the Bible that commands slavery."

Robert Walton writes, "“Slavery and indentured servitude in Scripture involved ownership of a person's labor, not ownership of the person. Any approach to slavery that implies one person can legitimately own another is contrary to Scripture because it denies the humanity of the slave."

And lastly, there is absolutely no extrabiblical data on any slaves in Israel. The private and public documents of the ancient Near East from 3000 BC to the times of the New Testament are full of references to the practice of slavery in the parallel cultures, but nothing from Israel. R. Alan Cole agrees and says that "slavery in Israel was rural, domestic, and small scale, if at all. There were no 'slave pens' of imperial Rome, or the racial subjugation of colonial America."

> When jesus was criticized for picking seeds on the sabbath, what was his justification?

The action in and of itself was not against the Law of Moses (Deut. 23.25). There was also nothing in the Sabbath laws forbidding their actions.

In the treatise "Sabbath," the Rabbis established 39 categories of activities that must not be performed on the Sabbath (these were categories of their own making, not ones in the Mosaic Law). These categories of forbidden activities are called Aboth, or "Fathers." In turn, these main 39 categories are subdivided into 39 classes that are called Toledoth, or "Offsprings," making a total of 39 x 39, or 1521 Sabbath rules. The preparation of food is a vast and complicated part. The kindling of fire, and in modern days even the turning on or off of electric lights is prohibited. Writing of any kind is prohibited.
The Rabbis themselves seem to have been aware of the flimsy structure of their injunctions and prohibitions. One of them said, "Some of the laws of the Sabbath are like mountains suspended on a hair" (Chagigah 10a). "Reaping" was one of the 39 kinds of work forbidden on the Sabbath (Mishnah Shabbath 7.2.) under prevailing Halakah, but not all authorities prohibited what the disciples were doing. Specifically, Moses didn't prohibit what the disciples were doing.

But even according to the general opinion of Jesus' day, it was permissible on the Sabbath to pick up fallen ears of grain and rub them between the fingers. And according to Rabbi Jehuda, also a Galilean, it was also permissible to run them in one's hand. In other words, Jesus was following the Galilean tradition that allowed Him and His disciples to rub the corn in one's hand and thus was not guilty under the oral tradition in the breaking of the Sabbath Law.

In other words, Jesus wasn't breaking the law of Moses, but only the man-made Pharisaic rules. What Jesus and his men were doing was basically lawful. There must have been some kind of nuance or some local interpretation that was opening them up to criticism. At a much later period, the Gemara expressly permits picking grain by hand and eating it on the Sabbath but merely forbids the use of a tool. This refinement is much later after this incident, though.